‘Outstretched Arms’: What Haniyeh’s assassination means for Israel’s long war

The Middle East woke up to shocking news the morning of July 31, 2024, after Palestinian militant group Hamas had announced that Ismail Haniyeh, the head of its politburo, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Tehran, Iran.

Haniyeh was in the city attending the inauguration ceremony of the country’s newly-elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian when a guest house he was staying at was struck by an Israeli projectile at 2 a.m.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian, and Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani joined Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Russia in an ever-growing chorus of nations condemning the assassination.

Israel, keeping up with its modus operandi on such events, has remained silent, neither confirming nor denying its involvement in the strike, which occurred the same night as the Jewish state’s airstrike on southern Beirut that killed Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr.

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Both strikes come two weeks after Israel stunned Yemen’s Houthis by carrying out a raid—aptly christened Operation ‘Outstretched Arms’—on the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah with Israel Defense Forces F-15s, leaving the city’s port and local electricity infrastructure smoldering as onlookers gaped in surprise.

For long since October 7, 2023, Israel has delivered an underwhelming response to Iran and its proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq, joining the current Gaza War in support of Hamas.

However, things would change after the July 19 Houthi drone strike near the US Consulate in Tel Aviv, which left one Israeli dead, prompting the airstrike on Hodeidah.

Another straw that broke the camel’s back came with Hezbollah’s July 27 rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Majdal Shams, which left 12 dead and 42 injured, primarily Druze children aged 10-16, prompting a series of Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

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All in all, Jerusalem has ‘flipped the switch’ in its long war with Iran and its regional proxies, becoming increasingly willing, as it should, to pursue fiery vengeance and retaliation for attacks against its interests in the Middle East wherever its enemies are located.

Prior to Israel’s airstrikes on Hodeidah and Tehran, the relationship dynamics between Israel and its regional adversaries operating outside the Jewish state’s immediate neighborhood disadvantaged Israel to the benefit of Tehran, as Israel displayed a stubborn reluctance to strike at its adversaries’ overseas outposts in order to avoid upsetting its Western allies, chiefly the United States.

Hamas notably leveraged its political office in Doha, Qatar, where it housed its senior leadership with the blessings of the Obama administration.

From Doha, Ismail Haniyeh and other top leaders communicated their plans and strategies to representatives in Gaza, like Yahya Sinwar and Marwan Issa, who, before their deaths, implemented the leadership’s decisions, including attacks on Israel and taking hostages.

Because Jerusalem has long ruled out the option of assassinating Hamas’ leadership on Qatari soil out of fears of alienating Washington, which sees Qatar as a major non-NATO ally and negotiation partner in Afghanistan and Gaza, Hamas’ top leaders enjoyed relative impunity as their subordinates suffered the brunt of Israeli bombardment.

Had Ismail Haniyeh remained in Doha, without heading to Tehran, that impunity would have continued; for, it is highly unlikely that Jerusalem would attack Hamas targets in Qatar anytime soon.

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To a lesser extent, Iraqi militia groups such as the Population Mobilization Forces and Kataib Hezbollah enjoyed a similar immunity borne out of an Israeli desire to respect Washington’s wishes to not sour US-Iraq relations by virtue of Israel unilaterally eliminating targets on Iraqi soil. While Israel did before October 7, 2023, launch a series of air strikes in 2019 targeting Iran-affiliated Iraqi militias in five locations across Iraq, Jerusalem, for the most part, refrained from attacking Iraq.

Israel, however, was not the only entity to adjust its operations in anticipation of the cacophony of calls for de-escalation from Western capitals that urge all sides to bury their grievances to avoid an ill-defined “escalation,” even if history has shown that backing down out of a desire to de-escalate and achieve “peace for peace’s sake” has only empowered America’s and Israel’s adversaries in the Middle East and done everything but achieve peace.

Iran-backed proxies, such as the Houthis and Kataib Hezbollah, too have learned to exploit the naivete of the Western masses and governments by attacking Israel from Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq, hoping that Jerusalem would absorb the strikes without responding lest by retaliating, the global left and Western governments clamor about Israel’s supposed escalatory activities that apparently harms the livelihoods of populations where the proxies are based.

If anything, Tehran’s proxies proved adept at playing that game—framing Israel’s responses to Hezbollah and the Houthis as “aggression” against a supposedly innocent Lebanon and Yemen, a game they learned well from their Palestinian counterparts.

Israel’s strike on Hodeidah and Tehran demonstrated that the game is now over.

Since October 7, 2023, Jerusalem’s heart has hardened as it comes to recognize over the course of its more than nine month war on Hamas that all Western countries that simplemindedly demand de-escalation for de-escalation’s sake do not, or rather, cannot, put Israel’s security first the way only Jerusalem can do—self-reliance is a basic, yet often forgotten aspect of our anarchic international system, a tenet of realism that liberal internationalists, out of strategic folly, disdain.

As such, Israel has come to understand that following pacifist proposals from the West will only concede Israel’s security edge to its enemies. Yet for a while, Israel retained some restraint out of respect for the West, and reservations among its liberal-minded leaders.

However, with the Iranian airstrikes on Israel, the Houthi drone strike in Tel Aviv and the missile attack on Majdal Shams, that restraint has faded as the foolishness of those who expect Israel to take successful aerial interception as a win and suck up any attacks from regional adversaries lay bare for even the most pacifist of Jerusalem’s leaders.

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Israel’s airstrikes on Hodeidah, and execution of Haniyeh in Tehran has sent out an important message to the region that Israel can and will reach its enemies no matter where they are in the Middle East: Tehran after all is very close to Israel compared to Hodeidah, so are various countries in Israel’s neighborhood.

For those in Hamas and other Palestinian factions who fool themselves into thinking they would be safe in Istanbul or any other Middle Eastern country, the precision with which Israel liquidated Haniyeh in the most anti-Israel country in the region demonstrates that taking out Palestinian targets in Istanbul, Iraq and elsewhere could be easier for Jerusalem.

Many analysts would describe escalation as another consequence of Haniyeh’s assassination. Those who do so rely on the faulty premise that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a political rather than religious conflict.

However, the conflict is more religious than political, with eschatological significance for all three Abrahamic faiths. As such, to the disappointment of idealists, even if Israel took on a ceasefire and refused to carry out strikes like the ones on Hodeidah and Tehran, the escalation in this conflict will take on a life and growth on its own.

Escalation is inevitable.